In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They must be fit for it: they must not do too much of it: and they must have a sense of success in it --not a doubtful sense, such as needs some testimony of others for its confirmation, but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it. View quote | Auden, W. H. quotes

A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do. View quote | Auden, W. H. quotes

When our eyes see our hands doing the work of our hearts, the circle of Creation is completed inside us, the doors of our souls fly open and love steps forth to heal everything in sight. View quote | Bridge, Michael quotes

After all, it is hard to master both life and work equally well. So if you are bound to fake one of them, it had better be life. View quote | Brodsky, Joseph quotes

Poor workers! First they're cuckolded, and, as if that weren't enough, then they're beaten! Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation --that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno --I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it! View quote | Bunuel, Luis quotes

The secret of making something work in your lives is, first of all, the deep desire to make it work: then the faith and belief that it can work: then to hold that clear definite vision in your consciousness and see it working out step by step, without one thought of doubt or disbelief. View quote | Caddy, Eileen quotes

Work is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great images in whose presence [His Or Her] heart first opened. View quote | Camus, Albert quotes

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man. View quote | Carlyle, Thomas quotes

Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments, Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, know what thou canst work at. View quote | Carlyle, Thomas quotes

The average person puts only 25% of his energy and ability into his work. The world takes off its hat to those who put in more than 50% of their capacity, and stands on its head for those few and far between souls who devote 100%. View quote | Carnegie, Andrew quotes

Never hire anyone who is going to report directly to you who you do not intuitively just plain like from first impressions. If your instincts tell you you're going to have a hard time working with someone, pass. View quote | Charette, Fred quotes

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. In what we call art, it's one of the most desirable characteristics of a piece of work. View quote | Cohen, Leonard quotes

Sir Walter, with his 61 years of life, although he never wrote a novel until he was over 40, had, fortunately for the world, a longer working career than most of his brethren. View quote | Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan quotes

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an ethic. View quote | Ehrenreich, Barbara quotes

We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What business has he with an evil trade? View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes

Work and thou canst escape the reward; whether the work be fine or course, planting corn or writing epics, so only it be honest work, done to thine own approbation, it shall earn a reward to the senses as well as to the thought. View quote | Emerson, Ralph Waldo quotes

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross -- was that a failure. View quote | Farrar, Frederick quotes

One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours --all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy. View quote | Faulkner, William quotes

There isn't any luck that enters into anything, unless it's poker or shooting dice, maybe. There is no luck to merchandising. There is no luck in going out and working from early in the morning to long after dinner. That is not luck, it's work. View quote | Fitch, Fred W. quotes

Good work habits help develop an internal toughness and a self-confident attitude that will sustain you through every adversity and temporary discouragement. View quote | Fleyer, Paul J. quotes

The object of living is work, experience, and happiness. There is joy in work. All that money can do is buy us someone else's work in exchange for our own. There is no happiness except in the realization that we have accomplished something. View quote | Ford, Henry quotes

The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get Up in the morning and does not stop until you get to the office. View quote | Frost, Robert quotes

Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute. They deserve the shortest hours and the highest pay. View quote | Galbraith, John Kenneth quotes

Going to work for a large company is like getting on a train. Are you going sixty miles an hour or is the train going sixty miles an hour and you're just sitting still? View quote | Getty, J. Paul quotes

Work is love made visible. And if you can't work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of the people who work with joy. View quote | Gibran, Kahlil quotes

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves. View quote | Grocott, Bruce quotes

Intimate or drastic elements in the work of others are untouchable and should not be commented upon even in their absence. Private conflicts, quarrels, sentiments, animosities are unavoidable in any human group. It is our duty towards creation to keep these in check in so far as they might deform and wreck the work process. View quote | Grotowski, Jerzy quotes

My work is magnified by the fact that the streets of heaven are too crowded with angels -- we know their names, they number a thousand for each red ribbon we wear here tonight. [Accepting his Best Actor Oscar for Philadelphia] View quote | Hanks, Tom quotes

If your work is becoming uninteresting, so are you. Work is an inanimate thing and can be made lively and interesting only by injecting yourself into it. Your job is only as big as you are. View quote | Hubbs, George C. quotes

Industrial man --a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement. View quote | Huxley, Aldous quotes

The question is not whether the system works, but whether we like the way it works. Just because something works doesn't mean it is desirable. Concentration camps work, if your purpose is to enslave people. Stealing works, if all you care about is money. Lying works, if you don't give a damn about your personal integrity. Literally anything, no matter how monstrously immoral will work, depending on your desires and how you define the term work, View quote | Leon, Sy quotes

He worked like hell in the country so he could live in the city, where he worked like hell so he could live in the country. View quote | Marquis, Don quotes

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic. View quote | Marx, Karl quotes

Labor is work that leaves no trace behind it when it is finished, or if it does, as in the case of the tilled field, this product of human activity requires still more labor, incessant, tireless labor, to maintain its identity as a work of man. View quote | Mccarthy, Mary quotes

Every job has drudgery, whether it is in the home, in the school, or in the office. The first secret of happiness is the recognition of this fundamental fact. View quote | Mcintosh, M. C. quotes

If it's true that men today value their lives outside of work as much as women do--and research proves it is--then they have to join women's fight to reconstruct the way we work and create a new, broader definition of success. View quote | Mckenna, Elizabeth Perle quotes

A man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful. View quote | Morris, William quotes

As American productivity, once the exuberant engine of national wealth, has dipped to an embarrassingly uncompetitive low, Americans have shaken their heads: the country's old work ethic is dead. View quote | Morrow, Lance quotes

There is always the danger that we may just do the work for the sake of the work. This is where the respect and the love and the devotion come in --that we do it to God, to Christ, and that's why we try to do it as beautifully as possible. View quote | Mother Teresa quotes

Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow -- security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself. View quote | O'Casey, Sean quotes

Work is the open sesame of every portal, the great equalizer in the world, the true philosopher's stone which transmutes all the base metal of humanity into gold. View quote | Osler, Sir William quotes

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase It is the busiest man who has time to spare. View quote | Parkinson, C. Northcote quotes

The intellectual equipment needed for the job of the future is an ability to define problems, quickly assimilate relevant data, conceptualize and reorganize the information, make deductive and inductive leaps with it, ask hard questions about it, discuss findings with colleagues, work collaboratively to find solutions and then convince others. View quote | Reich, Robert B. quotes

We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done. View quote | Roosevelt, Theodore quotes

Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. View quote | Thoreau, Henry David quotes

Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor. View quote | Twain, Mark quotes

Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running. View quote | Unknown, Source quotes

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way. View quote | Unknown, Source quotes

Every day's a perfect gift of time for us to use. Hours waiting to be filled in any way we choose. Each morning brings a quiet hope that rises with the sun. Each evening brings the sweet content that comes with work well done. View quote | Unknown, Source quotes

A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death: for, in relation to who or what is making it, it can only be one stage in a series of inner transformations. View quote | Valery, Paul quotes

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of work, because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do. The machinery is always going. Even when you sleep. View quote | Warhol, Andy quotes

A new breed of Americans born out of the social movements of the 60s and grown into a majority in the 70s holds a set of values so markedly different from the traditional outlook that they promise to transform the character of work in America in the 80s. View quote | Yankelovitch, Daniel quotes